Free Republic

After a commemoration organized by the Jewish Communities last week [April 15, 2016] and the official state commemoration on Friday [April 22], the third commemoration takes place at Jasenovac camp.

ZAGREB - Alen Budaj, an associate of the Jerusalem-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, has said that the coutries that are legal successors to the former Yugoslavia, Serbia in particular, must send a strong diplomatic protest to the Vatican over its intention declare Cardinal Alojzije Stepinac a saint. The Vatican has officially confirmed that Cardinal Alojzije Stepinac will soon be declared a saint. Immediately upon the entering of the Germans in Zagreb, on April 10, 1941, Stepinac supported the establishment of the Independent State of Croatia (ISC), which was declared a state by the Ustasha (Croatian fascist movement), and in 1945, he...

Ravnagora's note: Although first written in December of 2000, this essay is particularly relevant today in 2010, given Serbia's "apology for Srebrenica". ***** In an AP article dated 21 November [2000], Croatia’s president, Stipe Mesic, insisted that "ousting Slobodan Milosevic was not enough," and "urged Yugoslavia’s new leaders on Tuesday to hand him over to the U.N. war crimes tribunal and face up to their country’s role in the Balkan wars. Croatian President Stipe Mesic praised Yugoslavia’s democratization, which began with the election Sept. 24 of the new president, Vojislav Kostunica. But he said Kostunica should apologize for Milosevic’s policies,...

BELGRADE - They sit like open sores at the heart of this turbulent eastern European nation. Long before international fugitive Miladin Kovacevic revived tensions between the U.S. and Serbia, NATO bombs reduced a row of once formidable government buildings here to hulking shells. The ravaged red-brick and concrete buildings are still standing nearly 10 years after the American-led aerial assault. They represent a wound that, many Serbians say, still runs deep. "Our people look at America like it's an enemy," said Niko Percovic, 30, a reporter based in the northern city of Novi Sad. That is one of the reasons,...

24 June 2008 Zagreb _ A former US ambassador to Croatia has accused Zagreb of plotting and sanctioning the exodus of Serbs in 1995 to create an "ethnically clean" country. Peter Galbraith told The Hague war crimes trial of three Croatian generals, that the leadership headed by late President Franjo Tudjman used ‘Operation Storm’ to ‘cleanse’ Croatia of Serbs. “Croatian authorities either ordered or allowed a mass destruction of the Serb property in former (Serb-held region of) Krajina to prevent the return of the population. I consider that to have been a thought through policy,” he said, testifying at the...

Kosovo/Albania: Investigate Postwar Abductions, Transfers to Albania Official Dismissals Premature (New York, May 5, 2008) – Additional information has emerged that bolsters allegations of abductions and cross-border transfers from Kosovo to Albania after the 1998-1999 Kosovo war, Human Rights Watch said today. The Kosovar and Albanian governments should open independent and transparent investigations to help resolve the fate of approximately 400 Serbs who went missing after the war. "Serious and credible allegations have emerged about horrible abuses in Kosovo and Albania after the war," said Fred Abrahams, senior emergencies researcher at Human Rights Watch, who investigated human rights violations in...

17 April 2008 | 12:05 | Source: Tanjug ZAGREB -- Stjepan Mesic has criticized the Croatian parliament’s decision to spend more money on the commemoration for Bleiburg victims than Jasenovac victims. “The fact is, not one Jasenovac victim was to blame for the Bleiburg victims, but a lot of Bleiburg victims were guilty for a lot of victims at Jasenovac,” said the Croatian president, stressing that the excuse that Jasenovac had received money earlier and Bleiburg had not, did not wash. A commemoration for Second World War war crimes in Yugoslavia should be held in Jasenovac because it was the...

They took civilian captives to an improvised prison in the Ribnjak village, where they were physically and mentally tortured, then killed. An indictment has been filed against six military police officers for the murder of 16 Serbian civilians near the village Pakrac in 1991. The police were part of the former military police in the 76th independent battalion of the national guard. An investigation has been opened at the county court in Pozega. Even though the commanders of the military police in Pakrac, Damir Kufner and Dario Simic, have been arrested a month ago for war crimes against civilians around...

March 28th, 2008 Zagreb, March 28 (CP) – Retired Croatian army general Ivan Korade is being looked for by some 300 police special forces as he is believed to be involved in the killing of four people in Croatia’s Zagorje region. Ret. Gen. Ivan Korade, 44, known for his short temper and many incidents over the years has gone missing after bodies of people linked to him in some way had been found in two villages, one of which he has a home in. The first body was found in the late hours of Wednesday in a weekend home and...

MASSILLON, OH - D. Hunter Haynes said when he traveled to Kosovo in 2000, he was seeking adventure. What he found was a personal mission to raise awareness of religious persecution around the world. Haynes, 41, who went to Kosovo as a U.N. peacekeeper, said at least 150 Orthodox churches have been systematically destroyed or profaned there; the result of fighting between Serbs, and Albanians, Kosovo's majority population. In response, he started the Orthodox Christian Advocacy Institute, a company that investigates incidents of religious persecution — particularly involving Orthodox Christians — around the world. "I've thought about doing this for...

Focusing on Blackwater while neglecting MPRI is like investigating Ivan Demjanjuk for years on end, but allowing Adolf Eichmann to live peacefully in Buenos Aires. Up to 17 Iraqis were killed on September 16 by mercenaries working for the security company Blackwater USA, in what Iraqi and some U.S. officials say was unprovoked murder. Earlier this week two Armenian Christian women were killed by Unity Resources Group hired guns. A devastating report by the House Oversight Committee accused Blackwater of acting like murderous cowboys, but the firm still operates with impunity—unaccountable under either U.S. or Iraqi law. Yet while exposing...

Retired Croatian colonel Marko Jagetic says that 70 bodies of Serb civilians were collected after the campaign Medacki Dzep. Retired Croatian Army medical corps colonel Marko Jagetic testified at the trial of generals Rahim Ademi and Mirko Norac. He said that, after the campaign Medacki Dzep, more than 70 corpses of Serb civilians were collected in nearby villages and that many of them had marks that indicated torture and massacre. - Almost all the executed [people] were civilians and no weapons or documents were found on any of them – said Jagetic, who was the army doctor in charge of...

Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) recently reported about Canadian officers being frustrated by inaction over On March 27, 2006, Taylor wrote again about the Medak Pocket slaughter in Croatia: “[...] Over 200 Serbian inhabitants of the Medak Pocket were slaughtered in a grotesque manner (the bodies of female rape victims were found after being burned alive). Our traumatized troops who buried the grisly remains were encouraged to collect evidence and were assured that the perpetrators would be brought to justice.... “Nevertheless in 1995, Ceku, by then trained by U.S. instructors as a general of artillery, was still at large. In fact,...

Received this morning from Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Israel Director Efraim Zuroff (bold emphasis added): “Wiesenthal Center Expresses Outrage At Massive Outburst of Nostalgia for Croatian Fascism at Zagreb Rock Concert”:Jerusalem – The Simon Wiesenthal Center today expressed its sense of outrage and disgust in the wake of a massive show of fascist salutes, symbols and uniforms at a rock concert by popular ultra-nationalist Croatian singer “Thompson” attended by 60,000 people in Zagreb last night. In a letter sent today to Croatian President Stjepan Mesic, the Center’s chief Nazi-hunter Israel director Dr. Efraim Zuroff noted the presence of Croatian dignities, including...

From August 1941 to April 1945, hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews, and Romas, as well as anti-fascists of many nationalities, were murdered at the death camp known as Jasenovac. Estimates of the total numbers of men, women and children killed there range from 300,000 to 700,000. And yet, despite the scale of the crimes committed there, most of the world has never heard of Jasenovac. Following the Nazi invasion and dismemberment of Yugoslavia in April 1941, the "Independent State of Croatia" was established as a pro-Nazi government. It was dedicated to a clerical-fascist ideology influenced both by Nazism and...

Can a state commit genocide? Should an entire nation not just its presidents, generals, and soldiers be held responsible for humanity's worst crime? In one of the most momentous cases in its 60 years, the U.N.'s highest court will deliver its judgment Monday on Bosnia's demand to make Serbia accountable for the slaughter, terrorizing, rape and displacement of Bosnian Muslims in the early 1990s. If it rules for Bosnia, the International Court of Justice could open the way for compensation amounting to billions of dollars from Serbia, the successor state of Slobodan Milosevic's Yugoslavia, although specific claims would be addressed...

The trial of the former leader of the rebel Serb authorities in Croatia Milan Martic this week heard testimony from a witness who accused the UN of favouring the Croats over the Serbs and claimed that the US and Germany were instrumental in providing Croatian troops with weapons during the bloody Balkan wars. Patrick Bariot, a former UN Protection Force, UNPROFOR, soldier, strongly defended Martic and the Serbs, portraying the Serb population in the self-proclaimed Serbian Autonomous District of Krajina, SAO Krajina, as victims of an aggressive Croatian government and military and an international community that intentionally ignored their pleas...

Correct title: "Austria stalls on extradition after Nazi-hunter highlights actions of 92-year-old in wartime Croatia." "I was shocked when I found out that he was alive and living in Croatia." Hundreds of Jews and Serbs were herded into three collection points in Pozega before being sent to the camps. Most of the males went to the notorious Ustasha camp at Jasenovac, not far from Pozega. "The Ustasha played their role in the Final Solution," said Mr Zuroff. "Asner was an important cog in the Ustasha administration which aimed to wipe out the minorities."

THE TRANSNATIONAL FOUNDATION FOR PEACE AND FUTURE RESEARCH (SWEDEN) Srebrenica Muslims Remembered, The Rest Silenced PressInfo # 222 July 11, 2005 By Jan Oberg, TFF director There is every reason to commemorate the massacre by Serb soldiers on innocent Muslim civilians in Srebrenica ten years ago today. But unless it is considered acceptable to quantify crimes and politically misuse human suffering, there is no plausible reason to forget or silence other cases of massacres, ethnic cleansing and terror bombings in which other innocent people lost their lives. Other crimes silenced In September 2003, mainstream media around the world forgot to...

A class-action lawsuit charges the Vatican Bank with a role in the flight of pro-Nazi henchmen and loot from Europe after World War II Like any new pope, Benedict XVI inherits some problems from his predecessor, among them sexual abuse scandals and a Catholic Church deeply divided between progressives and traditionalists. Then there are William Dorich's accusations. Dorich, a Los Angeles book publisher, is the force behind a class-action lawsuit against the Vatican Bank and the Franciscan Order.